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Clearing Hard Drive Clutter

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Clearing Hard Drive Clutter

Trash Old Preferences Files

Delete Orphaned Aliases

Purge Those Custom Icons

Deck Your Desktop

Keep it Clean

More Ways to Save Space

It isn't always the big things that eat away at your closet space. Sometimes it's the little gimcracks that gather over time, making their way to the back of the closet where they collect dust and slow you down when you need to find something.

This same phenomenon occurs with hard drives. Sure, the Microsoft Words and Adobe PageMakers of the world take their toll on disk space. But so do a variety of small files that accumulate over time. Preferences files, aliases, custom icons--these and other items multiply as you use the Mac, nibbling away at disk space like termites and slowing down tasks such as opening folders and searching for files. And because of the way the Mac allocates space on hard drives, these little files take a bigger bite out of large drives than small ones. For example, the smallest file a Mac can create on a 230MB hard drive is 4K, but on a 1GB hard drive, a file can be no smaller than 16K.

Trash Old Preferences Files

Most programs create preferences files that store operating information, such as the size and position of windows, your custom keyboard and tool palette settings, and your serial number and registration information. These preferences files live in a folder named Preferences Folder, located within your System Folder.

When you delete a program, its preferences file stays behind, wasting disk space. If you use a lot of software--particularly if you try out programs from sampler CD-ROMs or you play with freeware and shareware--preferences files can multiply like rabbits. A search through my own Preferences folder yielded 345 files using a total of 5.6MB. Most of the files belong to applications I still use, but many are from shareware or demo programs that I'll never double-click again.

One way to clean out your Preferences folder is by hand--open the folder and drag to the Trash any preferences files whose programs are long gone. Don't fret if you accidentally trash a preferences file for a program you do still use--all programs I'm aware of will create a fresh preferences file if they can't find one, although you may lose any custom settings you created.

Another way to purge your preferences folder is with Jim Moore's O-Limpia freeware utility. O-Limpia displays a window listing your preferences files and provides several useful features that can help you determine whether a given file is needed. You can move unused preferences files to the Trash or attempt to locate the application that created them.

Delete Orphaned Aliases

I can't imagine using the Mac without aliases. The way they provide fast access to items buried within folders or stored on a file server is so convenient that it's no wonder Microsoft "adopted" the idea for Windows 95.

When you delete the item an alias points to, the Mac OS isn't smart enough to delete the item's alias. The alias hangs around on your hard drive, using up space.

Several outstanding freeware and shareware utilities can round up those orphaned aliases and send them packing. The best shareware alias-management utility is Laurence Harris's $10 Alias Director 3.5.2 (a 77K download), which I've praised many times before. Besides enabling you to create aliases that don't have icons (handy for saving desktop real estate), Alias Director provides a Check Aliases command that scans your hard drive in search of unattached aliases. When it finds one, you can reattach the orphan to a different item or delete it.

Another great alias utility is Blue Globe Software's $15 AliasZoo (a 270K download). It lacks Alias Director's battery of alias-creation shortcuts, but it does have superior alias-management features. AliasZoo searches a hard drive or folder and displays a report listing details on the aliases it finds. You can delete orphaned aliases by selecting them all and then clicking a Trash icon.

If you have AppleScript installed, you can use two freeware applets by John Du Bois. Apple Menu Cleaner removes orphaned aliases from the Apple Menu Items folder, while Launcher Item Cleaner removes them from the Launcher Items folder. Both are bare-bones--you don't get a chance to verify or even examine their deletions, for example--but their prices are right.

Purge Those Custom Icons

System 7's custom icon feature is a fun way to dress up disk, folder, and file icons. Many CD-ROM developers (myself included) use custom icons to decorate the folders that contain software compilations.

But custom folder icons slow down the process of displaying a disk's contents--open a disk containing numerous custom folder icons, and the icons drip onto the screen, one by one. And they take up disk space -- each folder icon is stored in a separate, invisible file named Icon.

You might think the solution is to delete each folder's custom icon using the Get Info command. Besides being a lot of work, this doesn't address the disk-space issue: when you clear a custom icon, the Finder doesn't delete the invisible Icon file; it simply removes the icon resources from that file.

The real solution: a $5 utility named Folder Icon Cleaner (a 52K download), by Fabrizio Oddone ("killing icons is perfectly legal here in Italy," his documentation states). Folder Icon Cleaner lets you scan a folder or an entire disk and delete all the custom icons and their corresponding Icon files. Even better is the program's Erase Unused option, which annihilates all those empty Icon files that are left over when you remove custom icons using the Finder.

Laurence Harris's $25 shareware utility FileBuddy (a 320K download) can also delete empty icon files and can handle many of the other cleanup chores I've mentioned here, including checking the Preferences folder and scanning for orphaned aliases.

Deck Your Desktop

One of the most common pieces of advice you hear in the Mac world is concerns rebuilding your Mac's desktop--that invisible database that stores information about a disk's contents. It's good advice. Rebuilding the desktop every month or two can not only keep a variety of system gremlins at bay, it can also free up disk space. I recently reclaimed nearly a megabyte of space from a two-year old Mac whose desktop had never been rebuilt. (Okay, so I don't always take my own advice.)

To rebuild the desktop, restart the Mac and hold down the Command and Option keys until you see a dialog box asking if you want to rebuild the desktop. Click OK, and then take a short break while the Finder does its work. Note that if you have multiple hard drives (or drive partitions), you'll see this dialog box for each volume. Just click Cancel for those volumes whose desktops you don't want to rebuild.

A variety of freeware and shareware utilities can also delete the desktop for you, forcing the Finder to rebuild it. Laurance Harris's FileBuddy is one. Another is TechTool (a 264K download), a freeware utility created by MicroMat Computer Systems. TechTool is also a superb tool for resetting your Mac's parameter RAM--that small, battery-powered area of memory that holds key hardware settings. It's the only utility I know of that can display two secret pieces of information located in the parameter RAM of every Mac from the IIcx on: the date the Mac was manufactured and the number of hours it has been used. If you want to know your Mac's birthday, TechTool is for you.

For Mac veterans, here's a variation of the desktop-cleaning routine. If you have older hard drives that you used with System 6, you can free up some space on them by deleting their invisible Desktop file. A $15 shareware utility, S. Koren's Kill~Desktop will do the job, as will any utility that lets you delete invisible files. Delete only the file named Desktop, not the files named Desktop DB and Desktop DF. (These are what System 7 uses instead of the Desktop file.)

Keep it Clean

I can't vouch for this, but I hear the best way to keep a closet tidy is to avoid cluttering it up to begin with. The best way to maximize your hard drive space is to perform the chores I've outlined here periodically. (You'll find more candidates for the Trash below.) Not only will you save disk space, but the Finder's Find command will operate faster, as will all programs that scan the hard drive's contents, including backup utilities and virus checkers.

Maybe you'll want to use the time you save to tackle your closets.

More Ways to Save Space

While you're clearing hard drive clutter, here are a few more candidates for the Trash:
Unused printer drivers System 7.5's standard installation includes printer drivers for Apple's most common machines. If you don't have a certain printer, remove its driver from the System Folder's Extensions folder. The space savings can be significant: the LaserWriter 300 driver, for example, uses over 300K.

Help files Once you've mastered a given program, you might want to trash the files that contain its on-line help text. These are usually stored within the application's folder, although you might also find them in the System Folder. In a related vein, the various Apple Guide files that accompany System 7.5 are big space users--collectively, they use over 2MB.
File converters If you do a complete installation of an application program, you may install file-conversion filters that you'll never use. Pare down your converter collection to only those that you actually use.
Sample, tutorial, and template files Most programs come with example documents that illustrate features, complement tutorials in the manual, or serve as boilerplates for your own documents. Look through your application folders and throw out the documents you know you'll never use. You can always reinstall them later.